How Quirky is Berkeley? Tyler Hoare’s sculpture and collage

For 40 years, Tyler Hoare (silent “H”) has been using the Bay as his gallery, gifting us with airplanes (most memorably Snoopy and the Red Baron), a pirate ship, a Viking ship and other sculpture. In 2014, Berkeleyside’s Emile Raguso wrote an informative article chronicling Hoare’s work. Things happen over three years, and so here is a brief update on our Bay-is-my-gallery sculptor in residence.

Hoare arrived in Berkeley in 1966 after earning a BFA in drawing and painting from the University of Kansas. He began building sculptures that he installed in and along the Bay, in Emeryville and Berkeley.

Tyler Hoare, August 2016. Photo: John Storey

The Bay, the weather and vandals are rough on his work.

Tyler Hoare repairing Emeryville airplane. Photo: John Storey

He doesn’t seem to take it personally. It doesn’t seem to discourage him.

Red Baron October 2017. Photo: John Storey

By the fall of 2017, Snoopy had been launched to his watery grave and a refurbished Red Baron owned the skies of Emeryville.

Lighthouse. Photo: John Storey

A lighthouse stands near the Red Baron.

Hoare has made a living designing home and commercial renovations — most notably a number of Mel’s Diner locations. And he has never stopped making art. Since the summer of 1976, he has maintained a gallery in Albany filled with sculpture and collages. All of the sculpture is made by assemblage, not by carving, addition not subtraction.

So there it is — a glimpse into four decades of relentless creativity. Tyler Hoare is enjoying the greatest commercial success of his career now. He has waited, he deserves it.

And his art gifted to the public continues.

Under the full eclipse sun, Hoare installed another Snoopy in the bay.

Eclipse Snoopy 2017. Photo: John Storey

Snoopy appears headed west to San Francisco, not south towards the Red Baron. Peace after all these years? Can it be?

Tom Dalzell, a labor lawyer, created a website, Quirky Berkeley, to share all the whimsical objects he has captured with his iPhone. The site now has more than 8,000 photographs of quirky objects around town as well as posts where the 30-plus-year resident muses on what it all means.